Urban regeneration, masterplans and resilience: the case of Gorbals, Glasgow

Over the last 200 years, particularly since the Second World War, comprehensive spatial masterplans, aimed at increasing the efficiency, amenity and value of degraded urban neighbourhoods, have been developed widely in the UK. However, contrary to the assumption of their creators that stable long-term outcomes could be planned and achieved, resulting environments often failed to demonstrate the resilience necessary to deal with the multi-scale changes cities face throughout their existence, often worsening the problems they set out to solve. Masterplans have therefore been the object of strong criticism and only recently, guided by place-making principles, have they started to be re-evaluated. But are today’s masterplans any better equipped to respond to the pace of current urban change? How can masterplans help make places better suited to positively respond to changes over time? To answer these questions, we explore the concept of resilience by comparing examples of nineteenth-century, modernist and recent masterplans, in a 150-year longitudinal study of Gorbals, a district of Glasgow. The successive developments are observed against five resilience proxies: diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. Preliminary results suggest that the transition from the first to the second development produced a reduction in all resilience proxies, only partially recovered by the latest development.